America Can't Move On from Trump When the Media Won't Move On from Trump
They are obsessed. He is all they have left.
Donald Trump has been out of office since January. No amount of revisionism can change the fact that he is out of office and really not a major impact on our lives anymore. Sure, Democrats and Republicans have decided they can’t live without him, but that is nothing compared with the desperation our national media displays in continuing to pursue his every word and action while out of office.
To an extent, as the last Republican president, Trump has some control over his party, but it’s largely the party’s fault for continuing to entertain his claims about the 2020 election and be beholden to his influence. However, the more air he is given, the more that matters, and that is what the media constantly tries to seize on. And it is as much about trying to trap Republicans within that Trump bubble as it is about chasing the views, clicks, and influence they saw while he was President and driving the news headlines.
The problem is, Trump is not a real draw anymore.
On the entertainment side of the media, this is the best Stephen Colbert can do in a post-Trump America:
Colbert rode the Trump high as much as, or even more than, anyone else in the late night talk shows. The fact that he as a political satirist can’t move on is pretty damning. He and his team of writers have invested their entire capacity for original thought in continuing to obsess over someone who is no longer in office.
To his credit, John Stewart was very noticeably of the left but did not hesitate to attack the left, and his run of The Daily Show was better for it. Colbert’s show, The Colbert Report, was a spin-off of that but centered around the character Colbert was building. He was never as funny or as original, and it showed. Another Daily Show alum, Samantha Bee, suffers the same hard-left Trump obsession as Colbert, but thankfully people forget her show exists until the show’s Twitter account tweets something so stupid it goes viral.
Stewart’s successor, Trevor Noah, is clearly struggling in a post-Trump world, as well.
“This dude has been saying for months that he is going to create a whole new social media platform to rival Twitter and Facebook, and he just ended up making a blog?” Noah said. “And not just that—he’s called the blog ‘From the Desk of Donald Trump’ when we know for a fact that he doesn’t spend any time there? You might as well call it ‘From the Juice Bar of Donald Trump.’’
Completely original thoughts here, definitely not the same talking point everyone on Twitter has been making.
The news side of media is just as obsessed with Trump to the point that it’s a way funnier joke than anything Colbert is capable of writing. See this from NBC News.
From the linked “news” story:
The Desk of Donald J. Trump is limited — users can’t comment or engage with the actual posts beyond sharing them to other platforms, an action few people do, according to the data.
Trump’s new blog has attracted a little over 212,000 engagements, defined as backlinks and social interactions — including likes, shares and comments — received across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit. Before the ban, a single Trump tweet was typically liked and retweeted hundreds of thousands of times.
The blog posts come in the form of statements that are also sent to supporters via email. In the multiple daily notes, Trump has attacked his political enemies and endorsed faithful supporters, continued to push false claims and conspiracy theories, and opined on news of the day.
Ah, yes, the old “He’s so unpopular we have to constantly remind you of that” play. Pretty sure that worked out for people in high school who played by those same rules (please note, I am a high school teacher and have yet to see it work).
At CNN, Brian Stelter continues to be the most obsessed when it comes to Trump, and it’s not a particularly close race. His newsletter is constantly riddled with hatred toward Trump and pro-Trump news outlets (and conservative media overall) and his show is just one bitter segment after another. If Trump touched it, Stelter hates it to the point of obsession, and that is reflected in his ratings - which, again, were higher on a week he took a vacation than anytime recently that he was on.
The thing to realize is, as I mentioned above, that this is as much about ratings as it is an agenda. Agenda-wise, most of the media leans to the left and has a very hostile attitude toward Republicans and conservatives. If they can tie the GOP to Trump, in their minds, then they will continue beating Republicans. Except if Trump were such a drag on the GOP, their losses in 2020 would have mirrored the polling. As it turns out, the American voters were tired of Trump, not necessarily Republicans.
And that plays into why using Trump for ratings is as bad for their agenda. People are tuning Trump out, and they are tuning out anyone who obsesses over him. That is why their ratings are in freefall and why they can’t seem to understand just how tenuous the Democrats’ hold in Washington D.C. is. Voters aren’t enthusiastic over the Democratic Party’s agenda any more than they are enthusiastic over Donald Trump. You will see 2022’s midterms as a referendum on Democratic policies rather than anything Trump-related as a result.
This obsession isn’t working, and no amount of ranting and raving about Trump will change that. People are already tuning these media folks up… although, to be completely honest with you, that’s probably not a bad thing.